AMD Zen 3 CPUs Vulnerable to Spectre-Like Attacks Via PSF Feature
An Anonymous Coward writes:
AMD Zen 3 CPUs vulnerable to Spectre-like attacks via PSF feature
US chipmaker AMD advised customers last week to disable a new performance feature if they plan to use CPUs for sensitive operations, as this feature is vulnerable to Spectre-like side-channel attacks.
Called Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF), this feature was added to AMD CPUs part of the company's Zen 3 core architecture, a processor series dedicated to gaming and high-performance computing, which launched in November 2020. (full article)
The feature implements a technique called speculative execution, which works by running multiple alternative CPU operations in advance to make results available faster, and then discarding "predicted" data once deemed unneeded.
Whitepaper: SECURITY ANALYSIS OF AMD PREDICTIVE STOREFORWARDING[.pdf]
[N.B. - The last statement in the whitepaper says "AMD recommends leaving the Predictive Store Forwarding feature enabled as the default setting." - Fnord]
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.